My twitter friend Penny Goring (@triplecherry) and I have never met. She lives in London, I live in New York. I am not even sure when or how we started following each other. About a year ago, I was scanning my friends’ tweets and happened upon a link she had posted to a story she had written, “Temporary Passport.” I fell in love with her piece (and writing) instantly, and vowed to animate it. A year later, we finished the animation. Our collaboration on it was entirely through twitter and facebook messages, something I found entirely appropriate because that is the space in which we became acquainted with each other.

When people tell me, “social media is just a bunch of people posting pictures of their cats and desperately crying out LOOK AT ME PLEEEZ,” I point to this as an instance where social media can inspire and bring people together… and then i get out my Blackberry to upload a photo of my cat to facebook and beg my twitter followers to tell my I’m pretty.

Temporary Passport was first screened first at the Chaosmos 2010 Exhibition (Independents Liverpool Biennial 2010): View Two Gallery, 23 Mathew Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. It was also shown at The Oxford in Kentish Town on Beatnic Night: an article about the event on The Spectator’s Arts Blog.

Penny reading Temporary Passport live here. Penny’s writing here.

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So my twitter friend, @triplecherry is the incredible writer Penny Goring. And this morning as I read her new flash fiction short, Temporary Passport, and I kept thinking as the words flashing frames of visceral and visual delight, “we have to turn this into an animated short.” She crams a fictional relationship into a series of pinhead sized moments that crystallize it’s ebs, flows, and eventual ‘drying up.’ Its mesmerizing to read/experience, haunting at the finish.

I thought animation for adults would be the perfect genre to at least try and capture the dizzying journey her words propel the reader through. Animation has the room for experimentation that brings the fantastic to life–if i can at least help touch upon the velocity and rapture of the original text i’d be thoroughly satisfied.

Penny’s “Temporary Passport” is cinematic in and of itself–and what a challenge it will be to try and recreate w/ sound via cinema the lushly layered sinesthetic moments she paint w/ punctuated, slicing speed that cut to the bone. And you bet her voiceover is winding in and out of it (no objections, a little bird told me you’ve the voice of “Mercedes McCambridge cross Edith Piaf”).

3d+2d+2.5D+stop motion + greenscreen/bluescreen is a process i will be experimenting with best outlined by this artist
who made this piece using the same techniques and software i will be using:

Here are some more animation inspirations i am using and will touch upon through out the work:

Visuals Penny has supplied to draw from:

Examples of my painting style which i will bring in texturing the piece:

old 3D work in maya never got around to exporting (laptop couldn’t handle renderingit hah) that i may use–can recycle all the buildings etc.:

Sierra Leone, 1970s, footage by Ken Rosen. Visit http://austerrosen.com to find out more about the play and book “Cut from the Same Cloth.”